@biblioracle
Writer, speaker, consultant. Chicago Tribune columnist, blogging at Inside Higher Ed. Coming soon, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. Previously: Why They Can't Write and The Writer's Practice. biblioracle.substack.com
3 questions that appear the end of my article for Edutopia on AI concerns with teachers
We are certainly at a crossroads around AI in education (and likely will be for some time) but I continue to think the focus needs to be centered on the choices ADULTS are making, not the students
Three questions I think are worth asking any educator using AI in their work right now:
It's true that Jordan had no primary antagonist throughout his career, but I think there's something to be said for the way he vanquished his forebears one at a time - Thomas, Bird, Magic - and then brushed off others like Drexler, Barkley, Stockton/Malone with relative ease. Dominance.
Thank you for sharing this. You've made my day!
Would insisting in class that Michael Jordan (not LeBron James) is the greatest basketball player of all-time run afoul of a new university system policy in Texas?
Maybe! Which shows the true nature of initiating a policy like this.
I reflect on a past class discussion that would have run afoul of a new University of Texas System policy prohibiting discussions on "controversies not germane to the course." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...
Very enjoyable article by @biblioracle.bsky.social shows how great it is to engage a college class in a fun discussion that might not be exactly on point. Faculty in states like Texas now have to be afraid to teach like this.
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...
I know I'm in an AirBnB somewhere that someone else has arranged. I hope I don't go broke Lyfting and Ubering. Any chance you're around to break bread? DM me.
Perusing the sessions before going to SXSW.edu next week and whipsawing between "that looks sort of interesting" and "that sounds absolutely horrifying."
My colleagues at ACRLog wrote short tributes to the life and work of Fobazi Ettarh @fobettarh.bsky.social. I wrote about her work on disability, which I think deserves more recognition. acrlog.org/2026/03/04/t...
Thanks @ezerrenner.bsky.social for coordinating. #CripLib #VocationalAwe
Fantastic work from @davekarpf.bsky.social putting some perspective on the notion that AI can do social science research. It can generate passable journal articles, which is not necessarily the same thing. It's a chance to consider what we should be valuing. davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
Yep. I use the nearly identical Campbell's Law because he studied education, but same thing. By the time students get to college they've become so good at hitting the target they've hindered their capacity to progress as writers.
If I ignored the profession part, I would probably spend more time writing short stories/novels because that's pleasurable, but at the same time, if I ignored the experience part, I would not have managed to find a pleasing intersection between writing I find stimulating and making $'s.
This is a useful frame for my own thinking. As I weigh it, much of my own work is working through when it is useful/necessary to ignore this fact. Writing is my "profession" & I have to be clear-eyed about that, but it is also something I experience daily, and it's this experience that most matters.
A cascade of B.S. coming from all sides! That's interesting. The biggest mitigation for this problem in students, I found, was convincing them that what they were writing "mattered" for reasons beyond grades. Maybe this study points that this is also true for LLMs?
I have had a large handful of people tell me this as well. I ended up putting it as a discussion question in the (forthcoming) paperback edition of my book because I think it might be rather common.
Honestly, I think I do have it figured out with this framework of building a writing practice, but to get students thinking about their writing that way requires planting some foundations that are not getting built in earlier grades. The problems I was writing about 15 years ago persist today.
I'd be very happy to see it & for sure the structural imperatives of the spaces we work in are going to determine what happens inside corporate spaces. I think they're going to do lots of short-sighted stuff and mostly don't want higher ed to follow them down that path. We have more to offer.
IMO, The biggest question going forward is what kind of experiences people like your son need to do that work well. I think the roots are "writing" but the understanding of what that means has to go beyond what is often measured in and valued in education contexts.
My recommendation to the world of transactional writing is to use AI as the opportunity to examine how much of that text truly needs to exist. If it's automated in both generation and response, it might be "bullshit." biblioracle.substack.com/p/bullsht-wr...
For sure. Though, I worry that people often see writing that is not wholly transactional as transactional because we've lost grounding in what the experience of writing is meant to embody and "do" for the writer and the audience. This is, of course, my longstanding objection to the 5PE.
In terms of teaching writing, I think there's limited utility in trying to instruct on automated text instruction before students can "write" which for me means them having a solid base in their writing practice (skills, knowledge, attitudes, habits of mind).
...reviews that get sent to a layer above. Huge time savings, freeing up capacity for other things, but this person is obviously less connected to what the people who report to them are doing. This must have some consequences, I think likely bad.
The key question, I think, is to understand the tradeoffs in choosing automated text production over writing, particularly when it comes to how writing connects us to the things we're writing about. I had a conversation with someone who says they're using Claude to do all employee performance...
Thinking back on my years in market research I can envision numerous tasks where automated text production would've been a benefit in terms of speed - and in some cases where I was transposing data from spreadsheets to text - accuracy. The reasons I can identify those things is because I can write.
For what it's worth the distinction I now make in my presentations/workshops is "writing" as I talk about it in the book, which is my own definition of the term and "automated text production" which is more what you're talking about. There are clearly useful applications of automated text production
I will sponsor it through my tech consultancy, "That Won't Work, Bro INC." www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-v...
You might be right. I was thinking of the car companies doing the math on the expense of adding safety features like seat belts and deciding that excess deaths were cheaper, but they may not even bother making those calculations.
It's tough to tell someone that it's a good idea to pursue a career in academia at this moment. We might come out of this with something better, but right now, the only way I'd recommend graduate study is if they want to do it for its own sake and does not mean taking on debt.
I can say that knowing the parameters of what I really enjoyed helped me better shape what came after into something like it. It allowed me to stay connected to teaching in ways I wouldn't have been able to do before. It's been a real process, though. Lots of shifts along the way.
I'm not sure how much more evidence school administrators and teachers need before they put a stop to socializing children into lifelong Google customers and users of Gemini, but I sure hope that day arrives sooner rather than later.